"The Horse And His Boy" Inspired by Turkey's Fairy Chimneys?

I always thought it would be cool to carve out a home in one of the Fairy Chimneys in Turkey. I'm convinced that CS Lewis was inspired by these when he wrote of the "tombs" in The Horse And His Boy calling them, "...great masses of mouldering stone shaped like gigantic beehives, but a little narrower."

Here is the best web page on Turkey's Fairy Chimneys you will ever see.

Your First Good *** ?

If you have a hobby of any kind, it probably required some kind of item, utensil, tool etc. in order to make your hobby doable, and you'll never forget the joy of getting that thing whether it was your first real leather baseball mitt or maybe if you're a women it was more along the lines of your first sewing machine. But you never forget that first great one—whatever it was. And if you don't still have it, you probably do have a picture of it.

This was my first really good guitar. It was a Daion Heritage-78 that I bought brand new in 1979 for around $400. It was a dynamite guitar for the money, with a cedar top and made of solid woods all around. It even had wood binding. The only thing they skimped on was the bridge-plate which was made of a kind of plywood. It did indeed crack eventually (though I got many years out of it first!), and I had it replaced with a piece of solid maple. Frets Magazine used this very model for all their string and pickup tests over the years. Daion was a great company, and the first to come out with a truly affordable guitar for the working man that was still a great axe. I played this guitar for over 20-years until I actually wore big ruts in the fretboard!

I have a couple of short recordings I made with this particular guitar, although niether is great sonically (I didn't have the best microphone for acoustic back then), but this is the better sounding of the two. I must have recorded it around 1990 or so. The bass gets a little boomy in places, but it ain't terrible. I think you can still tell how nice these guitars sounded. This pice doesn't have a name. It was just an intro for another tune (which I chopped off at the end). So here you have it—"The Nameless Daion Guitar Song."

Flying In A Blue Dream

I had the most wonderful dream a couple of weeks ago. It took place in the evening, and everything was the most beautiful shade of blue, as though looking through blue-shaded sunglasses. I remember seeing that the north-western coast of California was crumbling away into the ocean—huge chunks of cliffs nearly a mile high (land is almost always mountainous in my dreams) were falling little by little. Then myself along with some other guy and a girl flew to Alaska in a helicopter (the girl was piloting). We were somehow going to save California by doing something there. When we got to the bay around Prince William Sound, us guys dropped into the water from an altitude of a couple hundred feet (would have killed us in the waking world), and I remember how wonderful it was sinking to the bottom of the bay and coming back up where everything looked so stunning in that blue night air. The water felt so nice, and everything seemed so utterly real for a dream. I began to swim for the shore to meet up with my comrade when I awoke, so I didn't get to see how we would save California. Darn! But it was about the nicest dream I ever had. Maybe it means there's hope for the world or something.